Science as national belonging: The construction of Svalbard as a Norwegian space

Introduction

A home is more than a house. The English language is rife with homely phrases (pun intended) that capture this distinction. Home is where the heart is, a place to which a person belongs in a sense deeper than mere presence. The term may also be collective. In 1917, Lord Balfour, then Britain’s Foreign Secretary, used the term ‘national home’ in connection with his government’s pledge to allow Jews to settle in Palestine – connoting belonging without the specific legal ramifications of the term ‘state’ (Balfour, 1917; Schneer, 2010). The notion of a homeland evokes similar feelings of legitimate, natural presence in a manner that need not be contiguous with the borders of a state. But the Balfour Declaration captures another important point, namely that although the justification for a home may often rest upon history and tradition, such processes have the effect of garbing the contingent in the clothes of the natural. The instruments through which belonging can be created often include historical narratives based on archeological and linguistic continuity. In the case of uninhabited spaces, science has formed a powerful and more overtly constructed means of establishing a sense of belonging to the nation. While the function of science as an instrument of state power is well established, the cold, rational quality of scientific descriptions of the territory is not frequently considered a component of creating belonging. Can the process of describing an uninhabited space through science produce a sense of belonging of the kind associated more with the realm of culture and politics, constructing a home rather than demarcating a territory?

This article explores how senses of belonging have been established, maintained, and contested through science on the archipelago known as Spitsbergen until 1925 and today officially known as the Norwegian province of Svalbard. Located almost halfway between the north coast of Norway and the geographic North Pole, Svalbard lacks an indigenous population and is administered by Norway under an international treaty that came into force in 1925. Our central argument is that the process of constructing Svalbard as a space belonging to Norway, of locating a physical geographical environment within a cultural and political geographical imagination, has long been intertwined with the processes of describing and representing the archipelago. Moreover, we contend that participating in those processes has also permitted other states to articulate their own narratives of belonging on Svalbard in particular and in the Arctic more generally. We argue that although mining has long been regarded as the most powerful means of establishing ‘legitimate’ political presence on Svalbard (Arlov, 1989; Ulfstein, 1995), Norwegian authority over the archipelago has also been established through science: both the performance of scientific activities and their findings have helped build bonds of belonging that have legitimized and enacted national presence. From the later years of the 19th century onwards, national achievements in science fueled conceptions of national strength in much of Europe – notably in Germany and also in Norway (Friedman, 1995). Today the University Center is the largest building by area in Longyearbyen, Svalbard’s most populous settlement, while researchers from around the world have established stations under the authority of the Norwegian state at the former mining settlement of Ny-Ålesund.

Following scholars such as Gerard Toal (Tuathail, 1996), we emphasize the power of narration in constructing physical geographical environments (including through science), rather than regarding such environments as the pre-existing frames within which human agency may be exercised. Toal’s (Tuathail, 1996) conceptualization of geopolitical narratives as ‘scripts’ emphasizes the constructed and contingent nature of the stories that explain and justify actions. The exercise of scientific authority has provided not only a representation of what kind of space Svalbard is but also a narration of what it ought to be. As Jason Dittmer (2010: Chapter 4) puts it, representations function spatially and narratives function temporally: the construction of space is a chronologically situated act. Narrations of spaces and events function as rhetorical structures that order the world in particular ways. The conquest of space through representation can thus embody the progress of a nation – or the recovery of its rightful position – and validate particular national narratives of belonging.

Finally, the construction of belonging through science may legitimate sovereignty over a space in a manner that permits the cooptation of other national actors or traditions into a layered hierarchy. We claim that the concept of belonging can permit a more nuanced understanding of geopolitical narratives that draw upon science, allowing for presence to be legitimized without posing a threat under more exclusive notions of sovereignty. In the case of Svalbard, the imperative to control territory through science – the familiar nexus of knowledge and power – has been complemented by a more general sense that science may confer a sense of legitimate belonging that need not coincide with exclusive notions of sovereignty. Norway continues to articulate a narrative of enlightened authority through international science (especially climate change research), while also providing space for alternative geopolitical narrations, such as China’s use of Ny-Ålesund as a means of demonstrating legitimate presence in the Arctic.

Svalbard is a particularly apt space for exploring the dynamics of science and belonging because the lack of an indigenous population and the distance from the Norwegian mainland make the construction of belonging all the more obvious. Just as Antarctica has become a ‘continent for science’ in which science is a powerful vehicle for the articulation of politics (Elzinga, 1993, 2011; Roberts, 2011), Svalbard is a space where the connection between nature and nation requires overt construction – and where belonging can be mediated through science as much as culture.

Science, sovereignty, and belonging on Spitsbergen

The Dutch whaler Willem Barentsz made the first definitive sighting of Spitsbergen in 1596. The archipelago soon became a hub for the northern whaling industry. With the decline of that industry, the often-makeshift settlements established in its wake were abandoned, although hunters and trappers began to exploit the archipelago’s seals and polar bears. Geologists and zoologists, particularly from Norway and Sweden, began to visit during the 19th century. Under the terms of the 1814 Treaty of Kiel, Norway ceased to be under the Danish rule and was joined to Sweden in a union under the Swedish crown, making Norway a province of Sweden (albeit with a high degree of autonomy).

A book published over 150 years ago by the Norwegian geologist Balthazar Keilhau (1831) provides an early window into how Spitsbergen was perceived in not only scientific and political but also cultural terms. The first academically trained geologist in Norway, Keilhau, built his reputation upon geological fieldwork that fleshed out the natural heritage of the nation. Geir Hestmark (2004) notes that Keilhau’s appointment in 1826 as lecturer at the University of Oslo came with the expectation that he would ‘undertake scientific travels in the Fatherland’s less examined regions, as long as that is considered necessary and useful’ (p. 26). Spitsbergen was seen as identical to the land named in Norse annals as Svalbard, which for Keilhau established its location within the Norwegian national geographical imaginary. However, when Keilhau traveled to Spitsbergen, it was not at all clear that he saw himself as traveling within Norway. In the absence of Norwegian occupation, neither historical nor geographical affinities could establish Spitsbergen as specifically Norwegian. An exclusive sense of belonging was absent and Spitsbergen was not present within the horizons of a Norwegian worldview. And while Keilhau suspected that Spitsbergen shared geological similarities with northernmost continental Norway, those similarities extended also to Greenland and the archipelago of Novaya Zemlya. As historian Roald Berg notes (2013: 161–163), Keilhau’s work can be characterized as a form of ‘Norwegianization’ through its description of a space in terms that made it knowable to the Norwegian government (who paid for his expedition), but also to a wider educated public for whom Spitsbergen could be integrated within the same mental frame as Norway’s other northern periphery, namely Finnmark, on the border with Russia. This was a work of creation rather than recovery. Keilhau’s book sold poorly, and no further official Norwegian expeditions were sent out for 40 years, suggesting a degree of apathy on the part of both state and society.

Keilhau’s work nonetheless resonated with the ongoing project of creating Norway as a nation. Knut Einar Eriksen and Einar Niemi (1981) describe a long pattern of state concern for imposing the Norwegian identity upon ethnic minority groups in Troms and Finnmark counties. As Spitsbergen was a land without people, figures such as Keilhau became the agents of inscribing Norwegianness upon space. Legal scholar Geir Ulfstein (1995: 37) notes that diplomatic exchanges in 1871 suggested that Norway (then still a province of Sweden) regarded the archipelago more as res communis, as property held in common rather than the ownerless property of terra nullius. Whereas occupation of a space could confer sovereignty when that space was regarded as terra nullius, a state of res communis implied that a state of recognized commons already existed that could not be legally usurped by a single state merely through presence. Conceiving of Spitsbergen as a commons without a natural sovereign ought not to be confused with conceiving of it as a space where sovereignty was unnatural or where a sense of national belonging was precluded by the absence of political authority (cf. Barr, 1995). Indeed, the Norwegian–Swedish notes of 1871 that broached the idea of an effective commons arose after Norway floated the idea of assuming sovereignty, to which Russia responded that the present arrangement, in which no state held sovereignty, ought to continue (Ulfstein, 1995: 36–37).

Acts of describing and representing Spitsbergen appealed to a sense of belonging that derived strength from moral as much as legal principles and was not restricted to Norwegians. Urban Wråkberg (1999) describes the long history of Swedish research in Spitsbergen, which flourished into the early 20th century, as motivated by national glory in addition to scientific curiosity, with an added possibility of commercial benefit. The Swedish geologist Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, whose surveys of the archipelago located a coprolite deposit at Cape Thordsen in 1864, sparked the 1871 note exchange by seeking legal protection for a planned settlement that would combine mining, hunting, and fishing with science (largely but not exclusively geology and cartography) (Wråkberg, 1999: 291–292). Thus, a virtuous circle would be formed: science would describe the archipelago and its resources, a colony would be established to exploit them, and that colony would in turn support further scientific investigation. This suite of activities could create a sense of legitimate presence from which a legal framework for sovereign authority might be derived or justified – but not necessarily demanded. A home for science could be established that provided security for future research, perpetuating a tradition of Swedish science on Spitsbergen that increasingly became linked to depictions of Sweden as a modern, civilized nation.

Nordenskiöld was not the only person to enroll Spitsbergen in narrations of progress that brought the archipelago into larger projects located much further south. The synergies between science and European colonial projects elsewhere in the world, which produced maps, mines, markets, and more, became ever stronger in the late 19th century as science became seen as an aid to rational resource management in addition to a means of locating and charting resources (Hodge, 2007; Roberts, 2011; Rozwadowski, 2002; Schwach, 2000; Stafford, 1989). Dag Avango (2005) describes how turn-of-the-century visions of a steel-making boom in Sweden, fueled by iron ore from mines in northern Sweden and coal from Spitsbergen, created a conceptual place for Spitsbergen within political and economic spheres and a demand to ensure an effective legal order based on sovereignty. Such narratives depicted regulation as a natural accompaniment to economic activity. The idea that the physical geography of Spitsbergen needed to be incorporated within a stable political and legal geography gathered speed from the end of the 19th century, as individuals and small syndicates began to stake claims to sites that were promising for coal mining (cf. Barr et al., 2012). The absence of a sovereign power was interpreted as the absence of a common legal framework to resolve disputes. This in turn created space for arguments that advocated sovereignty on the grounds of superior capacity to enforce rational, stable administration rather than historical presence or even geographical proximity.

Even at this time, the direct equation of legitimate authority and exclusive sovereignty was far from accepted. Discussions about an international governance regime incorporating shared sovereignty resumed with some vigor between 1910 and 1912, including discussions on how shared administration of hunting, property rights, labor rights, and much else might function. Spitsbergen was one of the myriad territorial issues raised at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference that followed the First World War. Negotiations at the Conference resulted in the Spitsbergen Treaty, which was signed in 1920 and came into force in 1925. The treaty granted sovereignty over the archipelago to Norway, which had attained full independence from Sweden in 1905, in exchange for citizens of signatory states being guaranteed equal rights to conduct economic activity. This arrangement not only formalized Norwegian sovereignty, but also conferred a responsibility to effectively administer Svalbard, to act as the guardian of a domestic order.

Adolf Hoel and belonging through science

The geologist Adolf Hoel (1879–1964) played a crucial role in establishing Norway as the ‘natural’ source of political order in Spitsbergen and, concomitantly, in establishing that the archipelago was a space that belonged to Norway. Hoel excelled as a student at the University of Kristiania under the mentorship of Waldemar Christopher Brøgger, who instilled in Hoel a deep commitment to viewing science as an expression of patriotic attachment to territory (Drivenes, 1995; Hestmark, 2004; Nilsen, 2000; Skarstein, 2008). From 1907 onwards, Hoel became a regular visitor to Spitsbergen, charting the archipelago’s geology and playing an active role in its economic exploitation through advice to companies (and participation in mining speculation) (Drivenes, 2004). His long career became marked by a dual commitment to developing a scientific understanding of the environment of Spitsbergen archipelago and ensuring that it became part of the Norwegian state. Science was a central means of establishing and maintaining a domestic order in part because it could be used to describe Svalbard in a manner that permitted both sentimental and administrative bonds.

Hoel quickly grasped that Norway’s limited sovereignty over the archipelago could be enacted not only through fieldwork conducted by Norwegians but also through the regulation of scientific activity in a manner that made clear who did and did not have the right to work on Svalbard. The archipelago would be made safe for science while being made safe through science. The dynamics here bore strong similarities to those in East Greenland, where Denmark invested heavily in science to reinforce its sovereignty, which drew counter-attempts from Norway, in which Hoel again played a leading role (Drivenes, 2004; Ries, 2003). In early 1928, Hoel became head of a new body known as Norges Svalbard- og Ishavsundersøkelser (Norway’s Svalbard and Polar Sea Investigations (NSIU)). Hoel thus gained an institutional apparatus that could put his hitherto ad hoc expeditions on a more permanent footing (Drivenes, 2004; Nilsen, 2000). Regular supply voyages to the archipelago would ensure a regular stream of scientific data and create a need for more facilities, which in turn would reinforce the Norwegian presence. Importantly, Hoel’s duties also included acting as a gatekeeper for non-Norwegian scientists, who were required by official state edict to file plans with NSIU in advance (for reasons of safety and efficiency, it was claimed) and to leave tasks such as naming topographic features to the Norwegian authorities (Norwegian Government, 1928). Control over the environment and control over scientists were part of the same package. The reach of the Norwegian state through Hoel’s office and through the Governor of Svalbard rendered Svalbard a safe space for science, simultaneously providing evidence that the archipelago was under legitimate administration and establishing that administration as a natural state of affairs.

Just as the Svalbard Treaty provided a legal framework to stabilize the commercial environment for miners and hunters, NSIU and its associated regulations stabilized (indeed domesticated) Svalbard as a physical geographical environment through science. Hoel developed a particularly strong interest in photogrammetry (the reconstruction of topographic surfaces from aerial photographs), and both cartographic and geological surveys continued. As historian Jo Guldi (2012) observes of a quite different context – debates over roads in 19th-century Britain – the ability to marshal ‘an overwhelming onslaught of quantified facts’ concerning the topography, economy, and geology in a particular area can provide compelling evidence of privileged knowledge, and with it, privileged authority to make decisions (p. 102). At the same time, researchers from the biological sciences helped to define and categorize the biota of Svalbard in a manner that also lent itself to administration. Alf Wollebæk’s (1926) study of the endemic Spitsbergen reindeer subspecies used reports from hunters and other visitors to build a picture of change in populations through time, a narrative of decline that in turn bolstered Hoel’s (1926) argument that state intervention was needed to arrest a precipitous drop in reindeer numbers (p. 11). One might go further and note the symbiotic relationship between the reindeer and the Norwegian humans whose presence enabled them to be observed and regulated. The declensionist narrative of reindeer numbers that Hoel and Wollebæk articulated could be mobilized as proof that management was required to ensure their survival – with the Norwegian government’s prompt declaration of a moratorium on hunting a testament to how Norwegians belonged on Svalbard as much as the reindeer.

Science was used to not only assert but also to contest the legitimacy of Norwegian sovereignty over Svalbard. Many scientific visitors acquiesced to, or even embraced, the geopolitical script that Hoel advanced, in which Norwegian authority facilitated research of various kinds, and we will shortly explore how Hoel’s nationalistic vision could be reconciled with alternative national scripts (Drivenes, 1995; Nilsen, 2000; Skarstein, 2008). But for those who questioned Norwegian authority in the first place, attacking Norway’s record as a facilitator of science was a means of denying its legal and moral rights to sovereignty. The Swedish aristocrat Lage von Stael-Holstein (1932) – who nursed a grudge over his own failed investment in a Spitsbergen coalfield – unfavorably (and probably unfairly) compared the quality and quantity of science performed under Hoel’s aegis with that conducted earlier, principally by Swedes. The archipelago could not be considered under effective Norwegian control because Norway had not ensured that it was described, known, and administered in a comprehensive manner. Moreover, the baron argued, Norway’s insistence upon oversight of foreign scientists amounted to an attempt to monopolize research on Svalbard, with the same deleterious effects that commercial monopolies exerted upon trade (Von Stael-Holstein, 1932: 28). The depth of von Stael-Holstein’s resentment was stronger than the empirical evidence he marshaled, but the terms upon which he chose to fight are revealing: attacking Hoel’s scientific enterprise was a means of attacking the legitimacy of Norwegian authority over Svalbard more generally (Grydehøj et al., 2012).

Science was also a source of sentimental bonds between Norway and Svalbard that could help to naturalize the cold logic of administration. To use Thongchai Winichakul’s (1994) phrase, the Norwegian ‘geobody’ – the cartographic representation of the area to which a national character was ascribed (and demarcated) – had to be expanded to include a space that had not always been obviously national. Cartographic and geological surveys were a necessary part of that process, particularly as they facilitated representation (and administration). The botanist Hanna Resvoll-Holmsen’s flora of Svalbard performed a different and subtler role. To the Norwegian, she argued, ‘like a new piece of his fatherland, these Arctic islands demand a place in his heart’ (Resvoll-Holmsen, 1927: 5). Sympathetic to Hoel’s nationalistic agenda and eager to reveal the beauty of the lands she came to know (including through color photography), Resvoll-Holmsen saw her project as more than a contribution to botany. Through the production of a text that represented Svalbard and its botanical features, Resvoll-Holmsen helped establish an image of the archipelago that was at once familiar and exotic, but most certainly Norwegian. Resvoll-Holmsen’s botanical work lacked the dimension of obvious practical utility possessed by geology or even zoology. But her book and its illustrations created a more emotional bond of belonging that performed the same work of naturalizing Norwegian authority and of making Svalbard part of the fatherland. Knowing Svalbard leads to loving it and thus to incorporating the archipelago within the borders of the imagined Norwegian nation.

The intertwined relationship between knowing and belonging reached its apogee in Hoel’s vigorous but largely unsuccessful attempts to establish areas of Svalbard as national parks. Hoel became chair of the Norwegian Society for Nature Conservation in 1935 and was able to use the society as a platform for articulating a message of nature protection as a means of honoring the nation (Hoel, 1935). Just as Wollebæk characterized the reindeer population as a problem that demanded Norwegian action, with a solution that legitimized Norwegian authority, Hoel mobilized descriptions of flora, fauna, and geology to construct an image of Svalbard that the imagined community (Anderson, 1983) of Norwegians could be invited – indeed instructed – to embrace. Despite considerable efforts, Hoel had to be satisfied with smaller actions, such as a ban on hunting polar bears on Kong Karl’s Land. The practical difficulties of enforcement made declaring national parks a largely symbolic act (and a problematic one at that, given the eyebrows that would have been raised in other Treaty signatory states had large swathes of territory been declared off-limits to economic activity). There were limits to how far Hoel, Resvoll-Holmsen, and others could push the state to show appropriate love for the nation’s natural patrimony. But the campaigns that they undertook were important in establishing that Svalbard, no less than Finnmark, the Jotunheimen mountains, or the forests near Oslo, was a part of the nation’s natural heritage.

Non-Norwegian scientists could also be coopted into scripts that reinforced Svalbard’s status as a distinctly Norwegian space, even while creating complementary bonds of belonging. In 1930, an NSIU expedition discovered the remains of the Swede Salomon Andrée’s ill-fated 1897 attempt to reach the North Pole by balloon, resolving 33 years of mystery over the men’s fate. The return of the bodies and diaries of Andrée and his two companions sparked a brief burst of Swedish interest in its Arctic history (Sörlin, 1999), an interest that the Swedish geographer Hans Ahlmann turned into a resource for his own desire to research the glaciers of Svalbard. The role played by Norwegians in recovering a lost Swedish expedition symbolized a partnership that Ahlmann quickly turned to his own advantage (Svenska Sällskapet för Antropologi och Geografi (SSAG), 1931). Sweden’s long history of geological (and to a lesser extent zoological) research on Spitsbergen formed the backbone of a script that established a sense of Swedish belonging through science that reinforced rather than threatened Norwegian sovereignty. Ahlmann’s two expeditions to Svalbard, in 1931 and 1934, were explicitly labeled as joint ventures between Norway and Sweden that mobilized Sweden’s historic tradition of science on Spitsbergen as complementary to Norwegian sovereignty. Like his doctoral research on the Jotunheimen mountains in Norway, another nationally resonant landscape first investigated by Balthazar Keilhau, Ahlmann’s research in Svalbard used science as a means of validating the Norwegian character of the space through Swedish actions – of asserting that Swedes belonged, without being sovereign masters. In the years that followed, Ahlmann expanded this script into a vision of a distinctly Nordic Arctic that Sweden facilitated through the coordination and promotion of scientific research (Roberts, 2013).

Ahlmann’s (1932) relationship with Hoel is revealing not only for the manner in which a Nordicist geopolitical narrative could be accommodated within a quite aggressively national Norwegian narrative but also for the more nuts-and-bolts benefits that the Norwegian regulation of science could provide. In a 1932 article in the Swedish cultural journal Ord och Bild, Ahlmann argued that there was nothing inherently special about polar science: diligence, skill, and personal fortitude could make polar field sites as controllable as those anywhere else. Ahlmann practiced what he preached. His coworker Harald Ulrik Sverdrup’s field diary from the 1934 expedition paints a picture of diligence, with working days stretching to 30 hours on one occasion (Sverdrup, 1934). Norwegian authority controlled and ordered Svalbard to the point where specific glaciers could be identified in advance as appropriate field sites. Ahlmann thus conformed to, and indeed reinforced, the narrative of stability through Norwegian authority that Hoel had so eagerly advanced. The Norwegian character of Svalbard that he deemed so essential did not preclude foreign actors. Rather, it enrolled them in a geopolitical script that legitimized Norwegian authority through effective administration; their presence in the space, which was made safe by and for science, served as a testament to the legitimacy of the order that made such scientific work possible in the first place.

The ultimate expression of Ahlmann’s polar geopolitical narration, and its capacity to establish belonging for multiple national traditions, came not in Svalbard but in Antarctica. After examining glaciers across Svalbard, Iceland, and Greenland during the 1930s, Ahlmann became convinced that glacial retreat could reveal climate change (Sörlin, 2009). The Norwegian–British–Swedish Antarctic expedition of 1949–1952 (NBSX) had as an emblematic aim to determine whether that warming was global in extent (Roberts, 2011; Swithinbank, 1999). But Hoel was absent. His radical nationalism had led him to Vidkun Quisling’s National Union party in 1933 and eventually to disgrace after he served as Rector of Oslo University during the German occupation (Drivenes, 2004). During those dark years he continued to view Norwegian sovereignty over polar spaces as an important national goal and plotted to build public support through propaganda articles and statues in addition to lobbying ‘the men in Germany who will decide these things’ after the war (Hoel et al., 1943). As late as February 1945, Hoel sent Quisling ‘heartfelt and sincere thanks for the deep interest’ that he had shown for Arctic research (Hoel, 1945).

After the war, NSIU was quickly reorganized into a new body – the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI, established 1948) – that continued and in some ways extended its predecessor’s work. Ahlmann’s old colleague Sverdrup served as its first director and sought to refashion the organization as a research body capable of contributing to high-level scientific debates rather than as an instrument for accumulating descriptive knowledge of nationally significant spaces (Friedman, 2004; Nilsen, 2000). This included the inclusion of Antarctica within the NPI’s domain, which signaled a clear change from the NSIU days and is evidence that the Norwegian state viewed science rather than whaling as its main business in the far south (Barr, 2003). Sverdrup was the titular leader of the NBSX. Its emblematic goal, like its multinational structure, articulated Ahlmann’s geopolitical script – a narrative in which a set of northern European nations belonged in Antarctica in a manner that the United States (whose interest in the polar regions Ahlmann found threatening) did not (Roberts, 2011: 125). Echoes from interwar Svalbard were clear. Norway provided most of the money due to its concern for demonstrating sovereignty over Queen Maud Land, the slice of the Antarctic the expedition worked in, with Swedish and British scientists invoking national traditions based on science to strengthen rather than undermine Norwegian claims.

Despite Ahlmann’s skepticism, the hardening of the Cold War increasingly made Norwegian state policy in both polar regions an outgrowth of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) foreign policy aims. Norwegian participation in the Antarctic leg of the 1957–1958 International Geophysical Year (IGY) was driven almost entirely by American fears that Norwegian inactivity might justify increased Soviet presence (Friedman, 2004). Yet non-Norwegians also continued to be incorporated into scripts that expressed ambitions beyond the Manichean bloc politics of the superpowers. Even as Svalbard became a strategically sensitive site in the context of Cold War defense strategies, a Swedish–Finnish–Swiss expedition to the archipelago in 1957 brought together three non-aligned states in a joint contribution to the IGY – a fine example of how science could function as a vehicle for diverse geopolitical scripts during these years (Lewander, 2010). As the NPI sought to cultivate an image of legitimate Norwegian authority through science without the nationalist overtones, distancing itself from the discredited Hoel, the provision of a safe space for science became an ever-stronger means of articulating the value of Norwegian sovereignty over Svalbard.

Ny-Ålesund

In this final section, we return to a specific site on Svalbard – the former coal-mining community of Ny-Ålesund – and suggest that the narrative of establishing belonging through science continues to be important, even as alternative narratives of national belonging through science have been able to take root. Ny-Ålesund hit the headlines after a catastrophic explosion in 1962 that killed 21 miners and (indirectly) ended a generation of Labor Party government in Norway (Kristensen, 2012). Continued Norwegian activity was considered essential due to the perceived risk that the Soviet Union could occupy the settlement. Recasting a coal mining settlement as a home for science allowed Norway to not only continue its effective occupation of the Kongsfjorden region but also to articulate a narrative concerning its authority over Svalbard more generally. This narrative drew upon the international character of the Svalbard Treaty and thus affirmed the legitimacy of Norwegian political control by coopting and mediating narratives of belonging articulated by other nations.

Beginning in the 1960s, the material infrastructure of long-term scientific research sites validated Norway’s commitment to progressive ideals. The initial impetus was the European Space Research Organisation’s 1964 request to locate a satellite ground station in Longyearbyen; Norway recommended that it be located in Ny-Ålesund instead (Arlov, 2011; Grydehøj, 2014). A political decision was taken to repurpose the community as a center for Arctic science where state authorities, primarily the NPI and the former coal-mining company Kings Bay AS (repurposed as a provider of logistical services), could assure Norway a permanent scientific and logistical presence. The establishment of the University Center in Svalbard (UNIS) at the main Norwegian settlement of Longyearbyen in 1993 only reinforced this trend.

Embrace of the ‘knowledge society’ on Svalbard – in the sense of a state commitment to science and technology as a means of assuring national advancement (Jasanoff, 2005) – is a relatively recent phenomenon. But it is one that may be naturalized through its characterization as a logical consequence of past commitment to science, one that affirms the Norwegian character of the space upon which science takes place. Norway’s 1980 characterization of science and education as economic activities represented a key strategic move for maintaining Norwegian-controlled settlements (Arlov, 2011; Grydehøj et al., 2012). Under Article 3 of the Svalbard Treaty, all contracting parties are granted the right to pursue economic activities on Svalbard (albeit ‘subject to the observation of local laws and regulations’) (Svalbard Treaty, 1920). In the case of Ny-Ålesund, Norway’s facilitation of the scientific research-cum-commercial operations of signatory states affirms Norwegian sovereignty in both a legal and a moral sense. States operating stations in Ny-Ålesund are in this way enrolled in both Norwegian geopolitical scripts and in the production of Norway’s image as a progressive facilitator of multinational science.

Ny-Ålesund is a site of production for multiple geopolitical scripts. The stations established there by a range of nations through the 1990s and 2000s are more than facilities for conducting research: they are expressions of Arctic stakeholder status. China, India, the Netherlands, and a number of other states can enact not only their presence but also their right to be present in the Arctic, facilitated by the Norwegian conceptualization of Svalbard as a Norwegian space in which alternative narratives of belonging may also be articulated. This dual geopolitical function of Ny-Ålesund, in which both the sovereignty of Norway over Svalbard and the Arctic stakeholder status of extra-regional states are legitimized, is institutionally manifested in the Ny-Ålesund Science Managers Committee (NySMAC), which consists of representatives of seven Norwegian institutions in addition to 10 other states. Established in 1994, NySMAC coordinates research among the various national stations and plays an advisory role in Kings Bay AS’ administration of Ny-Ålesund. NySMAC meetings are often arranged in the states that are represented in Ny-Ålesund, demonstrating the international reach of the ostensibly local institution.

The second scripting for Ny-Ålesund – as a node for non-Arctic state presence in the Far North – was especially clear in the years before the admission of new observers to the Arctic Council in May 2013. In official documents and public pronouncements by officials from China, India, Italy, Japan, and South Korea, national science stations in Ny-Ålesund were repeatedly referred to in support of their case for Arctic Council permanent observer status (Paglia, 2016). The geopolitical function of Ny-Ålesund science stations can thus be understood as both a means of establishing a permanent physical presence in the High Arctic and of providing a platform for conducting the scientific research that enabled them to meet the Arctic Council’s criteria for admission as observers (Graczyk and Koivurova, 2014).

Furthermore, the content of the science often has a particular geopolitical resonance. Much of the science conducted in Ny-Ålesund is concerned with global environmental processes, which are expected to produce negative consequences in lower latitudes. This dovetails with the contention of non-Arctic states that they are Arctic environmental stakeholders at a distance. Put another way, the knowledge gained from Ny-Ålesund is characterized (one might even say naturalized) as directly relevant to a territorially distant state because its consequences will be felt within those distant borders. India elaborates its stakeholder status in terms of ‘teleconnections’ between environmental changes in the Arctic and their effect on the Asian monsoon upon which Indian food security depends (Government of India, 2013). Such scripting strengthens the sense that Indian presence in Ny-Ålesund – and the Arctic – is legitimate and indeed natural. This geopolitical narrative entails an Arctic stakeholder geography that is more global than regional and conforms to a script in which global environmental change justifies global scientific research.

Such conceptions suggest that the distinctive sense of belonging to a specific place has become secondary to a more general claim to interest in any distant site that can produce the relevant data. India may claim a right to be in distant parts of the Arctic, but Ny-Ålesund need not be the place in which that right is expressed. The fact that Ny-Ålesund holds the possibilities for such senses of Arctic belonging to be articulated is a product of Norwegian rather than Indian or Chinese design – a layering upon a foundational Norwegian conception of Svalbard as a Norwegian space, one that resonates with but is by no means determined by the legal construct that is the Svalbard Treaty. Norway has constructed Ny-Ålesund as a site where states such as India or China can manifest that sense of belonging. Despite Norwegian nationals being in the minority during the peak scientific season of July–August, Kings Bay AS’ small year-round presence and administration allow Ny-Ålesund to be portrayed as a Norwegian settlement, the foundation upon which others may build (and the authority to which that building must conform). The fact that all parties are engaged in the production of scientific knowledge reflects a consensus that Svalbard is a space for science – one made easier by discourses stretching back a century or more – and by the prominent position of the Arctic within climate crisis discourse (see, for instance, Symon et al., 2005).

To understand how Norwegian and non-Norwegian scripts coexist, it is instructive to examine the settlement and the station buildings upon which those scripts are inscribed. The built environment of Ny-Ålesund embodies a century-old narrative of continuous Norwegian presence: of the 33 structures in the settlement, 29 are protected as cultural heritage sites connected to the Norwegian coal-mining period. Other states lease space from Kings Bay AS – owned by Norway’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Fisheries – and thereby have limited ability to imbue sites with new cultural significance or create a permanent national association with the building that they occupy. Manifestations of state presence in the built environment of Ny-Ålesund are thus controlled by Norway. By defining their presence as articulations of Arctic belonging rather than steps toward territorial sovereignty, a relative absence of overt national symbolism can affirm the conception of Svalbard as a Norwegian space, within which other states may articulate their own scripts.

While Kings Bay AS is able to effectively regulate existing structures, recent years have seen examples of new buildings and instruments. Some are constructed and run by Kings Bay AS (such as the marine laboratory), but others are not – notably, the Amundsen-Nobile Climate Change Tower (CCT). Erected by Italy in 2009, it is one of the newest structures of significance in an otherwise Norwegian built environment. It clearly connects to the contemporary scripting of Ny-Ålesund and Svalbard as a site for accumulating knowledge related to climate change. Yet by invoking Roald Amundsen and Umberto Nobile, the CCT also pays homage to a somewhat ambivalent Arctic history between Norway and Italy. The tethering mast from which Amundsen and Nobile launched the airship Norge in 1926, and from which Nobile set out in the airship Italia in 1928, can still be seen in Ny-Ålesund. The 1928 voyage was ill-fated: Nobile crashed in the ice and Amundsen lost his life while attempting to rescue him (Bomann-Larsen, 1995). The distinctive – almost aggressive – nationalism that marked the original airship flights has been elided. Instead, with the CCT, the Amundsen-Nobile relationship has been located within a script that naturalizes Italian–Norwegian cooperation, with climate change replacing the geographic Pole as the goal. Data generated by the CCT are transmitted in real time back to Italy, where they contribute to global climate models. Interestingly, the CCT has been appropriated as a resource by other national programs based in Ny-Ålesund (South Korea has installed instruments at the tower), a reminder that legitimate belonging in present-day Svalbard entails the accommodation of alternative scripts.

Norway’s accommodation of almost every need for the practice of science in Ny-Ålesund provides non-Arctic states with a cost-effective means to establish a physical presence and localized science program in the Arctic. Through scientific activities around Ny-Ålesund, non-Arctic states become enrolled in a narrative of Norwegian authority characterized by robust stewardship of a space and support of scientific research on global environmental problems. It implies a somewhat more inclusive vision of the future of Svalbard, one that is nevertheless underpinned by Norwegian authority – in turn fortified by the politics of memory (cf. Elzinga, 2013), as embodied in the material structures of Ny-Ålesund.

Is it possible to articulate a narrative of belonging on Svalbard through science that does not involve submission to Norwegian administrative authority? Since 1957, Poland has run a substantial facility at Hornsund, rather than being a scientific tenant at Ny-Ålesund. Russia has recently committed to upgrading its scientific facilities at both of its main settlements, in Barentsburg and Pyramiden (Petterssen, 2015; Svalbard Integrated Arctic Observing System [SIOS], 2013). Establishing and upgrading scientific facilities at its own settlements articulate a Russian script rooted in continued historical presence through the 20th century – and legitimizes the existence of those settlements under the same logic that Norway applies to Ny-Ålesund. Russia cites archeological evidence to support claims that its nationals have been present on the Spitsbergen archipelago since at least the first half of the 16th century (Starkov, 2005), in addition to its more recent status as the only nation other than Norway to engage in coal mining at present. The characterization of science as an economic activity that Norway adopted for the sake of its own settlements might also be seen as mandating a Russian investment in science facilities. Hosting an independent science program is thus consistent with a script of Russian presence on its own terms rather than as a guest of Norway – and of being a strong Arctic actor with specific interests in Svalbard. At a time when tensions between Russia and NATO (of which Norway is a member) are again rising, this point is perhaps more relevant than ever.

Conclusion: Houses, homes, and belonging

Reading the instructions for would-be scientific visitors to Svalbard that Norway published in 1928, there is a temptation to think of them as the product of a bygone era, of a turbulent period in Norwegian history where dreams of polar empires from Svalbard to the South Pole became the stuff of violent public debate (Blom, 1973). The sense of distance is strengthened by Hoel’s own personal history as a collaborator. But the continuities between past and present in Svalbard are stronger than such a view would permit. Geopolitical narratives that use scientific activity to legitimize national belonging on Svalbard continue to be constructed in the present. The underlying connection between the legitimacy of Norwegian sovereignty and the provision of a safe space for science (in which other states might operate within Norwegian-defined frames) remains stronger than ever. As the example of Ny-Ålesund so powerfully demonstrates, the creation of a home for science is a process that remains situated within larger narratives of national belonging. The belonging that such activity is intended to create is by no means restricted to the specific space in which the station is based: for China, the microcosm of Ny-Ålesund can anchor a sense of belonging within the macrocosm of the Arctic.

We have focused on national traditions, national articulations of belonging, and the construction of belonging in the absence of the continuous human presence that is usually regarded as the foundation for such narratives. In the 21st century, this collective sense of belonging in Ny-Ålesund is built and maintained by individuals whose primary homes are somewhere else. Although individual scientists working along Kongsfjorden are often unaware of, or choose to ignore, the geopolitical function of their work, many cherish the exceptionality of the international community they are part of for weeks, months, or a series of summers. One longtime participant in the establishment of Ny-Ålesund as an international scientific community dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge calls it a ‘project of peace’ where a ‘higher level of civilization’ can flourish. In this reading of one of the multiple meanings of Ny-Ålesund, no station is an island, entire in itself. The metaphor can perhaps be extended to the place of the Svalbard archipelago in the contemporary Arctic and indeed the wider world. But a single nation – Norway – sets the terms that permit such a project to flourish, acting as a guarantor for continuity, even as the individuals come and go.

In a paradoxical way, the multiplicity of belongings that may be inscribed upon Svalbard draws strength from that very transience, the fact that the game can accommodate so many players and so many goals. Each individual who works in this remote and striking corner of the world integrates it within the narrative of their own career and their own life history; each nation locates the station it operates within a narrative of national belonging through continued scientific presence, while for Norway Ny-Ålesund as a whole provides an important component of a geopolitical script in which Norwegian authority over Svalbard is legitimized through a rhetoric of enlightened administration. The international character of Ny-Ålesund is thus an essential aspect of its value within a specifically Norwegian narrative.

As the Arctic is increasingly presented to global audiences as a bellwether of climate change, Ny-Ålesund produces knowledge of the polar present while offering a glimpse into the future fate of the planet as a whole. Belonging in the Arctic has arguably never been more important than today – and science has arguably never been a more valuable means of articulating that belonging.